Abstract
It has always been obvious that organisms vary, even to those pre-Darwinian idealists who saw most individual variation as distorted shadows of an ideal. It has been equally apparent, even to those post-Darwinians for whom variation between individuals is the central fact of evolutionary dynamics, that variation is nodal, that individuals fall in clusters in the space of phenotypic description, and that those clusters, which we call demes, or races, or species, are the outcome of an evolutionary process acting on the individual variation. What has changed during the evolution of scientific thought, and is still changing, is our perception of the relative importance and extent of intragroup as opposed to intergroup variation. These changes have been in part a reflection of the uncovering of new biological facts, but only in part. They have also reflected general sociopolitical biases derived from human social experience and carried over into “scientific” realms. I have discussed elsewhere (Lewontin, 1968) long-term trends in evolutionary doctrine as a reflection of long-term changes in socioeconomic relations, but even in the present era of Darwinism there is considerable diversity of opinion about the amount or importance of intragroup variation as opposed to the variation between races and species. Muller, for example (1950), maintained that for sexually reproducing species, man in particular, there was very little genetic variation within populations and that most men were homozygous for wild-type genes at virtually all their loci.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Boyd, W. C. 1950. Genetics and the Races of Man. Boston, D. C. Heath and Co.
Dolanský, L., and M. P. Dolansky. 1952. Table of log2 1/P, p.log2 1/p, and p.log2 l/p+ (l-p).log2 V(l-p). Technical Report 227, Research Laboratory of Electronics. Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dobzhansky, Th. 1954. A review of some fundamental concepts and problems of population genetics. Sympos. Quant. Biol., 20:1–15.
Giblett, E. R. 1969. Genetic Markers in Human Blood. Oxford and Edinburgh, Blackwell.
Harris, H. 1970. The Principles of Human Biochemical Genetics. Amsterdam, North Holland Publishing Co.
Hubby, J. L., and R. C. Lewontin. 1965. A molecular approach to the study of genetic heterozygosity in natural population. Genetics, 54:577–609.
Lewontin, R. C. 1967. An estimate of the average heterozygosity in man. Amer. J. Hum. Genet. 19:681–685.
Lewontin, R. C. 1968. The concept of evolution. The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 5:202–209.
Mourant, A. E. 1954. The Distribution of the Human Blood Groups. Oxford, Blackwell.
Mourant, A. E., A. C. Kopec, and K. Domaniewska-Sobczak. 1958. The ABO Blood Groups. Oxford, Blackwell.
Muller, H. J. 1950. Our load of mutations, Amer. J. Human. Gent., 2:111–176.
Prakash, S., R. C. Lewontin, and J. L. Hubby. 1969. A molecular approach to the study of genic heterozygosity in natural populations. IV. Patterns of genic variation in central, marginal and isolated populations of Drosophila pseudoobscura. Genetics, 61:841–858.
Selander, R. K., and S. Y. Yang. 1969. Protein polymorphism and genic heterozygosity in a wild population of the house mouse (Mus musculus). Genetics, 63:563–667.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1972 Meredith Corporation
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lewontin, R.C. (1972). The Apportionment of Human Diversity. In: Dobzhansky, T., Hecht, M.K., Steere, W.C. (eds) Evolutionary Biology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-9063-3_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-9063-3_14
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4684-9065-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4684-9063-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive